A Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) consists of wireless Mesh Routers (MRs) and Internet Gateways (IGWs) forming a multi-hop backbone network aiming to support end users. MRs are connected to IGWs in a multi-hop manner and IGWs connect the wireless backbone with the Internet. The capacity of the mesh network plays a crucial role in determining the number of clients the mesh network can support acceptable Quality of Service for multimedia data transfer. The capacity of the mesh network has been a limiting factor in its wider acceptance for such 4-G applications.
The issue of capacity is reflected when analyzing multimedia frames over mesh networks. The number of multimedia calls that can be placed in a mesh network drops significantly with an increase in the number of hops. The number of calls that can be supported becomes almost zero after a certain number of hops. Over the years, there have been numerous schemes and techniques proposed to increase the capacity of mesh networks that could support additional multimedia calls without increasing the number of IGWs as adding IGWs increases the overall cost. But, almost all of these schemes are inadequate in significantly improving the number of calls that can be placed on the network so as to attract attention of the general public for a wider acceptance.
The most common way to increase the capacity of a WMN that could support more multimedia calls is to deploy more IGWs. This definitely adds more bandwidth to the system as it decreases the number of hops for a multimedia call to reach a gateway. But, adding more IGWs further increases the cost of the network, making it prohibitively expensive and unattractive for a large scale deployment.